Black-Eyed Susan

by Ethel Calvert Phillips

Across the way and up the road stood the deserted little old schoolhouse, long ago abandoned for the new brick building in the heart of the village.

But, although Susan had no near neighbors and often longed for some one her own age to play with, still she dearly loved the lively Snuff who could outrace her any day, who played a skillful game of hide and seek, and who returned tenfold the strength of her love with all the might of his affectionate pink tongue, his briskly wagging tail, and his faithful little heart.

As for Flip, it is hard to say what Susan would have done without her. She was a long thin wobbly rag doll, with a head flat like a turtle’s, and not a single spear of hair on it. But to Susan, her brown eyes were the tenderest and her rosy lips the sweetest to be found anywhere, and it was into Flip’s sympathetic ear that Susan poured her griefs and troubles, great or small. She was Susan’s bedfellow, too, lying outside the coverlid where her little mother might easily put out her hand and touch her in the night.

Susan had other good friends, too. There was the newel post opposite the front door at home. Susan had never thought anything about the newel post until one day, playing “lady come to see” with a shawl on for a long skirt, she had tripped and bumped her head against the post. Now, this was fully six months ago, and when Susan was only a little girl, as she would have been sure to explain, and so she did what other little girls have done before. Feeling the newel post to blame for her fall, she pounded it with both hands and kicked it with both feet. And suddenly, in the midst of the pounding and kicking, Susan spied a big dent in the side of the post. Had she done that? Oh! what a mean, a cruel girl she was! She hurried upstairs for her new hair-ribbon, which she tied round what she called the newel post’s neck, and sitting down she tried to smooth out the dent and soothe the newel post’s hurt feelings at the same time. Perhaps Grandmother could have explained that dent as made by a trunk carelessly carried upstairs, but Susan always believed that she had made it. She rarely passed the newel post without giving it a pat, and, sitting on the stairs, she and Flip and the newel post often had many a pleasant chat together.

And there was Snowball, the rubber cat, that had been Susan’s favorite toy when she was a baby. Snowball may once have deserved her name. But now she was a dingy gray that not even frequent scrubbings with soap and water could freshen. She had lost her tail, she had lost her squeak, but Susan was loyal to her old pet and still lavished tender care upon her.

Then, too, there was the shawl dolly. Most of the time the dolly was a plain little black-and-white checked shawl spread over Grandmother’s shoulders or neatly folded on the hatbox in Grandmother’s closet. But whenever Susan was a little ailing, Grandmother folded the shawl into a soft comfortable dolly, who cuddled nicely and who never failed to give to Susan the comfort needed.

Just now Susan was playing school in the corner. She was the teacher, and Flip and the hassock, who this afternoon was a fat little boy named Benny, were the scholars.

“Flippy, who made you?” asked the teacher.

“God,” answered Flippy promptly.

Susan made her talk in a squeaky little voice.